• DESIGN FOR FOUNDERS · 02
Your users won't use the product the way you demo it
Abhinav Dhankar · 3 min read
When I started learning product design, I had one assumption I was quite sure about. Great design meant a finished product. The right visuals, clear functionality for the problem it solves, no upgrades needed because it was correct from the start, and users who move through it exactly the way it was meant to be used.
The deeper I went, the more wrong that assumption turned out to be.
The demo is the best day your product will ever have
Think about how you show your product to an investor or a prospect. You know the path. The data is clean. Nobody is in a hurry, nothing is half-filled, and you never click the wrong thing because you have clicked the right one a hundred times.
Your user has none of that. She opens your product between two meetings, with messy data from last quarter, on a laptop with fifteen tabs open, and she has no idea the shortcut you are proud of even exists. The same person behaves differently depending on how much time she has, how much pressure she is under and how well she already knows the product.
A demo shows what the product can do. Real use shows what the user can do with it. Those are two very different numbers.
Why this is a design problem
Users don't think in straight lines. Even if someone managed to build a perfect product, it would still feel unnatural to use, because we are not consistent enough to meet it halfway.
So a good designer starts somewhere else. Not with the screen, but with how it will feel to use the thing in the state the user is actually in. Solving the problem is the baseline. What separates a good product is how it behaves when conditions are not ideal: when the user is distracted, working fast, or coming back after two weeks and has forgotten everything.
Those are the moments where a product either holds or falls apart. And those moments decide whether your user renews, not the demo.
• TRY THIS ON YOUR OWN PRODUCT THIS WEEK
Pick the one task your product exists for. Ask someone who has never used it to do that task on their own, while you sit next to them and say nothing. No hints, no “oh, it's just here”.
Note every place they stop, scroll back, or ask you something. Each of those is a moment your product depends on knowledge only you have. That list is your first design brief, and you didn't need a designer to write it.
Good design is not how the product looks on its best day. It is how it holds up on your user's worst one.